Scattered votes or scarce votes?

I have always valued politicians who, when necessary, abandon the script and make proposals that involve a certain risk. That is what ERC deputy Gabriel Rufián has just done in Madrid. All my respect, although, as I will try to explain in this paper, neither the diagnosis nor the prescription seems appropriate to me. The discussion about how parties "to the left of the PSOE" should act (sicThe idea of ​​avoiding vote splitting, including the proposal to present single candidates per constituency, only scratches the surface of a much deeper debate. No one dares to address it, whether due to ideological discomfort and/or fear of political damage. In most European countries, the left has been losing its connection with the urban working class, as well as with a rural population that is currently at a critical juncture and which everyone ignores for a simple arithmetic reason: they represent few votes. Ultimately, the fundamental issue has little to do with the electoral tactics proposed by Rufián and much more to do with a lack of genuine representation: who feels addressed by this type of left today, who actually perceives a solution? This is the issue, and nothing else, and it cannot be resolved without a course correction that should have occurred long ago.

In the outskirts of large cities, many citizens live with an increasingly hostile reality marked by job insecurity, skyrocketing housing prices, and an overcrowding of public services that often renders them ineffective. If we look at election results (see Vox's results in Nou Barris, to give just one example), many people believe that, once institutionalized, parties "to the left of the PSOE" (sic, again)They have prioritized purely ideological discourses, sometimes very distorted, and have taken up imported cultural battles that are not part of the urgent concerns of their potential voters. When the political narrative shifts to issues that often affect only 0.1% of the population, and does so, moreover, with self-referential language and generally transposed from the Anglo-Saxon worldview, it becomes problematic. wokeA segment of the population feels left out. However, this disconnect isn't merely communicative, as the self-serving and exculpatory cliché suggests: it runs deeper. The paltry wages, the deindustrialization resulting from globalization, the attempt to transform the peasantry into a kind of involuntary forest ranger and tour guide, as well as migratory pressure that has altered villages and urban peripheries (but not affluent neighborhoods) have created forms of vulnerability that haven't actually created any. On the contrary: they are often met with a condescending chuckle, perhaps because they seem convinced that they refer to problems somewhere between vulgarity and unreality. They aren't believed.

As for the peasantry, the disconnect is even more pronounced. The rural world has experienced a growing sense of abandonment: excessive bureaucracy, pressure from large intermediaries, and a perception that environmental policies are designed without understanding the realities of rural life. Many farmers and ranchers have seen their demands belittled or interpreted through clichés. Predictably, this vacuum has been exploited by others who, with simplistic rhetoric, have managed to capitalize on the discontent. These disconnects may not have been inevitable a few years ago, but today they seem irreversible. European social democracy, which has managed to maintain or regain some popular support, has done so by once again placing people's daily lives at the heart of politics: wages, housing, energy, transportation, public services, and material conditions. The reform of the law that made repeat offenders legally free of punishment is, in this sense, a true reflection of the situation. With an attitude of moral superiority that I wouldn't call frivolous or irresponsible, some decided that this problem was imaginary, that this was buying into the right-wing discourse, etc. May reality never spoil our ideological trinkets! Things like this make the problem of parties "to the left of the PSOE" (sic(For the third time) the issue right now isn't the dispersion of votes... but the votes themselves, increasingly scarce. It's unlikely that, both here and in the rest of Europe, votes will go to parties that seem to be from another galaxy or, simply, from another neighborhood that has nothing to do with their own.